So Strange, What Cuts us Together and Apart
by tami3
Summary: The years following Lavi leaving Bookmanhood and working to become a full member of the Order. A deep friendship with Kanda makes it harder or easier--it's hard to tell.


So Strange, What Cuts Us Together and Apart

"You will always be loved from now on."

Lenalee's words are really an accusation. She heaps them onto the bent back of the old man.

The boy-not-a-boy nods absently to this tightly wound sweetness. It's knotted up in anger even as it tries to seep love.

The kindhearted girl (who cares for them like a mother does for children, or at least she's the closest they'll ever get) clamps firm fingers on his too-high-for-her shoulders. But Lavi's got his eye on the little figure shrinking into the distance, just over one of he own shoulders. Like an imp of conscience riding off into the sunset, never to return. Right, so it'd be the angel.

Bookman is being sent away. No. Chased off. Like a squatter goblin they'd suddenly discovered living in the attic, an ugly bad spirit that put a spot on their perfect little household.

Lavi feels sorry for the old man. But then again, it's not the impromptu eviction that's put that hump of fury in Bookman's spine. It's the bruised pride of being thoroughly processed by the graceless hysterics of these people who turned the tide against his will. Put through a blender of complaints about caring for (adopted) children, by the end he was so disgusted he hobbled out of Lavi's life all on his own.

Once again, Lavi's path has been set. In the same way like before…others (not him) discoursing about what it means to really have a noble purpose, and being where you really belong. They make it sound like destiny: "It is not a coincidence you have these abilities! You were born for our cause!"

He doesn't remember choosing this. But he doesn't remember making the choice last time either, so he guesses it's OK.

Allen's arms are thin and strong as they wind around him in a strident hug.

"It's a lie, you know. About the Order being corrupt. That's the Vatican, it's not us. There is…there's so much love here. So much family. You didn't give up anything worth more than that."

"Allen, don't talk about that now." Lenalee's voice snaps laughingly. "Lavi, welcome home."

Loved, huh?

They celebrate that night.

Lavi slips out from between all the warm-wishers: Komui, Jerry, Tiedoll, Johnny, Head Nurse and everyone. The flush of their praise and adoration warms the room. They've thrown a party in honor of his new life, like a baby shower late by some twenty years and then lightly sprayed down with beer once began. The heat of alcohol is making them rowdy and loose and nostalgic, so they sing songs of their childhood and dance dances of their homelands. They're delighted that Lavi knows quite a few of them and joins them in between drinks. There's a lot of touching as they grab onto him, slap his back, kiss his cheeks. (The girls are too light and too new to drinking.)

Lavi likes it just fine, but he's looking for something specific and he finds it in the late arrival taking a seat further from the center.

Lavi's friend is not caught up with the rest of them on losing his sobriety. It's not in his nature to want to, but at the moment he looks like he wouldn't hate it terribly if someone attempted to persuade him. He sits with his sword drawn up. His features are chiseled-cold and takes in the celebrating crowds and the raucous folk songs without any appreciation But he looks interested. That's enough to be called affectionate. Since it's him.

Lavi circles around him and tosses an arm under his chin.

"Well, yah ice block? You gonna welcome me home?" he says.

Kanda smiles wryly, the movement a subtle poke at Lavi's skin.

"Why? You've been here all along."

---

It's two months later . Lavi keeps shaking off Allen and Lenalee to go find Kanda. He's down to two prior-daily lunches per week before Allen finally heads him off at the cafeteria entrance.

"Listen." Allen mumbles, fidgeting more than he ever did in front of beautiful stranger girls (who almost always inevitably reveal themselves to be Earl's minions. Or die. Or do both). "I know you have a lot to think about…I get that, I really do…and no, Lavi, don't make that face, it only makes sense. And I know you don't want to talk about it, and I know you don't want to worry us by cutting yourself off completely, which is why you at least hang out with Kanda, but…come on, you're not being fair. Lenalee's hurt that you keep ditching us."

"Yeah. Sure. Sorry." Lavi apologizes, and makes a mental note to just agree to whatever "let's-go-to-town-and-do-this" Lenalee has in mind the next time she shines those anxious doe eyes on him. "Thanks Allen. For understanding."

Allen smiles with all the pure-hearted dimples of a church cherub. "No problem."

Nevertheless Lavi ends up spending his afternoon lazily sprawled on his back, face tilted up at the foamy grey-blue of an English sky. A little ways off, Kanda walks blind-folded across a set up wooden pillars. It's obvious that he misses the natural stumpy obstacle courses of the last base's woodlands. He makes up for the simplicity of the fake one here by having it on the roof's edge, where he can at least pretend he's in danger of plummeting to his death in misstep.

That's his signature style, making everyday routine a matter of life or death. Oh, he grouses about it from time to time, but you know that's the only way he ever gets things done. Well, Lavi knows, in any case.

"Since you were little, you've never asked me any questions." Lavi murmurs through his drowsing. At his side is a packed sushi lunch sitting in its untied cloth, picked at reluctantly by Kanda before being abandoned altogether. But Kanda doesn't eat much and it's a miracle he even took a bite of non-soba fare, so Lavi feels accomplished.

"Because I've never cared." a sightless and careless Kanda answers, pacing. The wind stirs the wayward hairs gathered at his band as he smoothly picks out his path.

"Hey, no fair! That's not what you said back to Lenalee." Lavi complains, laughing.

"…I've always known that you were a very weak man."

"That was mean, even if it was a joke."

"I don't joke." Kanda counters matter-of-factly. A sparrow flutters down and clings to the edge of his next stepping block. Kanda, unseeing, gives it a contemplative frown with his foot poised aloft.

Lavi flicks a few grains of rice in its direction and it abandons its contested perch to glut on Kanda's leftovers.

"Hey Kanda, what do you miss?" Lavi calls as he tries to entice the bird into his hand with a piece of cucumber. The sparrow cocks its head dubiously at the vegetable before snubbing him with a turned tail, hopping back to eat more rice. Damn, he shouldn't have opened with his trump card.

"Being able to train in peace and quiet." Kanda answers coolly.

"Aw, come on…I mean, what do you miss? Like, from home?"

Kanda's breath hitches and is weighted with concentration as he starts climbing a stair of skinny poles, each one taller and pointier than the last. His soles blushes deeper from the compression of blood behind his malleable skin. Lavi keeps his half-closed eye on him as he crosses the past the cloud-smudged sun and burns into a silhouette.

"I don't know. I was only three when I left. Being fed by someone else and not having to work yet. What else can I say?"

"Damn. That's…really sad….".

"Not really." Kanda responds shortly. "So? You really just wanted to tell me what YOU miss right? Spit it out, then."

"Oh...nothing too, I guess. Same story, right? I just wandered all my life. I mean, there was cool stuff…monuments, and markets, and new people and all that…but I never had anything long enough to miss it."

"What a complete waste of time." Kanda grumbles, not nice enough to keep it quite under his breath. He steps down and yanks off the cloth, making for the exit.

"Can you miss that?" Lavi ponders aloud when he's gone.

---

A year later Lavi pulls his arm out of a level three's too-human jaw and is humiliated by his own agonized screaming. The virus jamming its starry marks up his veins scalds like acid, bursting his cells so he can feel each one swelling and dying. The last time he was infected he'd more or less passed instantly from a ton of the ship's wreckage on top of him, and then Miranda's magic had purged the sickness out. This is new to him He'd find it intensely interesting if it wasn't killing him.

"Get your head together! You're going to die! Start thinking, start thinking, start thinking--!" his brain screams at him over his vocal cords. Another akuma punches its machete-like claws through his side. He feels one sliding past his pelvis and another brushing against the soft cartilage of his last rib. His lung pops and squirts a puff of air with the red stream.

Kanda throws out a hand and pulls Lavi to him, like the lead in ballroom dance. Lavi dimly feels his own body traveling the length of the akuma's fingers. They leave him, the loss of pressure giving him new pain as he staggers towards Kanda.

Kanda still has him by the wrist, and with a graceful tug he spins Lavi around--a blood semicircle paints a dance step on the floor--and with a flash of metal-bright flash Mugen, Kanda skims off the layer of diseased flesh. It wilts to the ground like a piece of finely sliced ham.

A week later Kanda--no really, Kanda himself--comes in to see Lavi. Bearing no gifts nor cards with loving words, but Lavi already has a pile of them (Allen, Lenalee, Krory, Miranda, all festooned with ribbons and floral decoration to the side.) Kanda just brings himself.

"What?" Lavi says warily as he peels one of "get-well soon" fruits.

"Just making sure you weren't wasting it." Kanda tells him haughtily. "The effort I put into saving your life. Do you have any idea how hard it was fighting two of them on my own, and trying not to step on you or slip on your blood at the same time? Word was you weren't even trying to regain consciousness."

"Dated news, Kanda. That was days ago." Lavi puts aside the banana and lies back down, drawing the coverlet over himself.

"Did you just call me-?" Kanda starts, suspicious.

"Yuu. Sorry. Shit. I meant Yuu." Lavi winds the sheets closer to him in two fists and turns to the wall. "…my lung's infected. I have a fever. My head's fuzzy from the drugs. I'll be myself soon."

"Will you?" Kanda doesn't ask him.

---

Another five months and Lavi is finally healed in the body, with the exception of the patchy scar on his arm. It looks like a mismatched square on a mended quilt. But there's something's changed about his spirit. For one thing, despite the reassurance Lavi fed him while convalescing in his sickbed, Kanda has not heard his given name once since then. Kanda doesn't mention it just in case Lavi's prompted to take up the irritating habit again.

Allen, however, has the jangling nerves of a chicken at the slaughter block. (You can't blame him. Whenever he notices something even a little off-color it usually avalanches into fiasco of broken hearts and broken homes.) So he runs after Lavi every free hour of the day, pressing him to talk about what's wrong. (To which Lavi argues straight-faced, "Why do you think something's wrong?")

Two months more and even Allen gives up. It's not because he's discouraged (Allen never gets discouraged, and who would if the sky fell on him as many times as it has with him and there's always been a reason to go on before?) His feelings are just hurt. It's because Lenalee finally confesses to Lavi, even though Lavi sends her on her tearful way with his deer-in-the-headlights stare.

"I don't think about her that way. Kanda, Allen hates me." Lavi says in dutiful regret, flattened on Kanda's bed.

"I suppose he does. Why are you in my room?" Kanda remarks above the reedy scratching of a whetstone thinning the edge of his sword.

"Why did she have to like me? Why not Allen?"

"Allen makes her lonely. She can't compete with his akuma obsession and she doesn't want to. You're nice to her and now that you have that 'Bookman' thing cleared up, she thought she didn't have anything to lose to anymore."

"What? Kanda, what…?"

"A few months after Bookman left, she started liking you, even though you never noticed. The beansprout tried not to either, because he liked the idea of her liking him but nobly standing aside for his mission. And now she doesn't have either of you. It's hard being a woman."

"But why do you…to you, of all people…don't tell me she could tell anyone else…"

Kanda laugh is one part lifeless and one part mocking, like the leer of a stone gargoyle. He flicks a strand of his hair at his blade and it splits.

"Yes. So very hard." he says.

---

Three months later Lenalee concentrates fixedly on her blood-red toes when she orders him tonelessly, "Stay together with Yuu. We need everyone to be all right at the end of this."

"Lenalee…" Lavi's throat tightens and it comes out a little strangled.

"I may be flying Allen ahead to get to the leaders, but we're not trying to clear the crowd here." she continues, her voice steady in its natural sweet timbre. "Don't play clean-up crew again, Yuu. Cut through as quickly as you can by engaging the lowest possible number of enemies. This is plenty dangerous. I mean it."

Kanda rolls his eyes at her and adjusts his grip with a faint clinking of decorative beads.

"We're off, then. Good luck everyone, as usual." Allen's words are spirited, but when he wraps his arms around Lenalee's waist, the gesture is tellingly neutral. As her legs flare up for take off, she keeps her face a careful distance from his. Lavi stiffly takes Allen's pat when Lenalee's lifted them high enough for Allen's dangling hand to be level with his shoulder.

"Lenalee, take care!" he yells after her desperately as she levitates them to the front lines. Already only a small blacked-out figure in the distance, the knob of her head might have twitched awkwardly in acknowledgement. Either that or an explosion of a haphazard shot from one of the akuma caught her attention.

His vision is shaken in a blurry burst of strange machine shapes on the horizon when Kanda sharply knocks him on the side of the head with his sword. Katana-whipped.

"OW!" he protests angrily. "What was that for?!"

Kanda resettles himself into the correct weapon-bearing stance with an air of irritated boredom. "Idiot." he drawls lazily. "Don't get so melodramatic over a routine mission like this."

"Lenalee--"

"--was laying it on so thick I thought I was going to puke. She's too nice to you. Don't be mistaken, it's going to be the same as always. Don't stray too far from me and we'll be back in time for dinner."

Lavi self-consciously draws his already grown hammer a little closer to his body--the opposite of a good offensive pose. The smooth, straight lines of Kanda's extended elbows make him force himself to readiness again. They wait back to back for the buzz of the coming horde to grow louder, but instead they hear delicate fire-work noises of Lenalee and Allen already at work: a slow beginning of several crisp, snapping victories, followed by a furious chain of noises cracking against the sky and eating into each other.

"What do you mean?" Lavi asks after a moment of popcorn-commotion.

Kanda snorts with impatient disbelief. "I mean I'm your babysitter." And with that he has the final word because a more covert akuma has slipped past Allen and Lenalee and is trying to bomb Kanda into oblivion. Lavi smacks it with his hammer. The buzzing thing is swept off course, but only sways a little closer to the earth with a cry of annoyance, like a fly miffed about being brushed away by a hand but no worse for it.

Kanda takes advantage of its momentary disorientation by jumping an inhuman height and sticking it between the eyes. Without a moment's delay he streaks off into the distance to where the bigger prey are battling it out. Lavi stumbles, narrowly avoiding the dying akuma's last uncontrolled spray of bullets. When he regains his footing he runs after his partner.

"You're my…Wait, Kanda!"

"Hurry the fuck up!"

"Kanda!"

---

A few hours later and Lavi hazily comes round to a rocking motion that jostles his body with every repetition. Someone is snarling. That makes sense since Kanda was the last person he remembers being with. But there's a feminine edge that means, wonder of wonders, that it's coming from Lenalee.

"…completely irresponsible, Yuu!"

Lavi opens his eyes and Kanda's carrying him piggyback, with Lenalee rigidly straight-faced beside them and unnoticing of his regained consciousness. Allen's trailing slightly behind her and sees Lavi lift his head, but uneasily shakes his head as if to tell him settle back down to avoid the current storm between their teammates.

"Give it up, Lenalee." Kanda's too-close voice is too loud in his ears and he winces. "Focus on the facts of the mission. We're completely fine, as always. He's got a field injury, again. You sure your feelings aren't clouding the way you see things?"

There's tears in Lenalee's voice with her angry cry of "Yuu!," but then Lavi hears the familiar whoosh of her taking off and flying away. Allen's continued footfall doesn't slip in its quiet, dejected pace.

"When did she start calling you that?" Lavi mutters, thick-tongued from some kind of head trauma.

"You don't go months of spilling your heart out to someone without getting more familiar with him." Kanda states shortly.

Usually, Lavi thinks.

---

After a year Lavi sits on a bench outside a drugstore in downtown London with his teeth clamped into a cloth. Kanda runs a needle through his chest. His movements are smooth, gliding the metal and thread in and out of his comrade to close up the ugly red slit.

No virus this time, but an akuma with a prosthetic limb that was, for all purposes and applications, a butcher knife. The enemy had sprung up out of the water upon as soon as they unloaded themselves from the ship. Kanda had turned into a fleet of smoldering metal-and-gunk flotillas with one sending of Ichigen, but not before it had taken one good swipe at his mission partner.

"Well." Kanda had raised one cool eyebrow at the growing bloom of red under Lavi's clutching fingers and sour expression. "We're almost at headquarters anyways."

"I'm sick of the hospital." Lavi had said, brittle with target-less anger since Kanda had taken care of the akuma so quickly.

So there they are, Lavi's brow sweating bullets because Kanda had said a regular drugstore didn't carry any anesthetics other than chloroform and whiskey and he sure as hell wasn't going to carry him back to base. Kanda crouches in front of him as Lavi clamps his fingers on the edge of the seat, eyeing the railroad track stitches that Kanda tacks onto him. A wet rag Kanda used to mop the cut up so he could see what he was doing is lurid and pink and sitting next to a cherry phosphate that Kanda got him because he has a sadistic sense of humor sometimes.

"Kanda." Lavi says when they're done and he's leaned back against the wall of the building with his eye shut. He neglects to put his shirt back on, so the wound-puffy flesh is exposed for anyone to see. Passerbys falter in their step when they see him, but they hurry themselves away quickly enough.

Kanda is wiping his hands on the already bloodied cloth they used to clean the wound. Thinking better of it, he uses the dew that has collected on the glass of Lavi's untouched soda. "What?"

"Don't you ever get tired of it?"

"Tired of what?"

"…Not being able to want what you want because we're 'chosen'. Fighting monsters and devils, and almost dying from it over and over again. Being tools of the Vatican when they treat us like we're expendable. Being in the apocalypse, with it being your responsibility not to fuck things up for the good side. That."

Kanda continues blotting his sticky red fingers as he answers.

"Can't be any worse than drifting from place to place, not believing in anything and anyone. Or running and hiding like a rat at any sign of danger because of an over-inflated ego over your own importance. And living a convenient cover for cowardice."

"That's not what being a Bookman was like, Kanda." Lavi sits up abruptly, blinking at him.

"Well then." Kanda says simply.

---

Three months later and Kanda finds Lavi outside Komui's office, leaning on the wall with his hands gripped together behind his back.

"Oh. Hey." he says when he notices Kanda staring at him. He's pale and his smile is stretched thin as he straightens to his full height--rightly putting him about an inch taller than Kanda. Undaunted, Kanda simply redirects his glare upwards.

"You're in the way. Move already, will you?"

Two minutes later and Kanda's long-fingered, wrenching grip is jerking him towards the bathroom because Lavi's head has suddenly sprouted leaks and he can't stop the loud sniffs that could draw unwanted attention.

"For fuck's sake, are you a man or not? Stop crying!" Kanda scolds unsympathetically. He throws the cold tap of one of the sinks on. Lavi ignores him to blearily study his unceasing weepiness in the mirror, so Kanda cups a hand under the faucet and tosses a handful of water at his face.

"Why do you have to do this now?" Kanda mutters at him crossly as Lavi stares at him through a mix of tears of water droplets. "I was already late for that appointment. Christ, are you doing this on purpose?"

Lavi smacks him.

"No." Lavi answers.

Kanda doesn't say anything for a moment. He keeps his head, turned from the blow, where it is. His cheek starts to color hotly where Lavi's hand made contact.

When he takes a deep breath, it sounds more like the ominous noise of a murderous dragon in a dark cave than a self-calming gesture.

"If you're going to hit me back, go ahead." Lavi baits him quietly, defiantly calm. "But you know that when it comes to a fist fight, you're not as safe from me as when you're swinging that sword around."

Kanda's boot connects solidly with his side in response. As Lavi is thrown into the door of a stall, making it rattle, Kanda grimly prepares himself to recall the martial arts basics he hasn't had much use for lately.

Lavi doesn't give him a chance to be graceful. He shoves him back straight into the sinks.

"God, Kanda! You're such an asshole!" he shouts.

Kanda gives a loud involuntary "Ah!" from the sudden lash of pain of his elbow hitting the counter. Lavi watches the cloud of furious annoyance spread across as Kanda's face as he rebalances himself. He shoots Lavi a dirty look and mutters something about someone walking in and getting the wrong idea. He sighs impatiently and crosses his arms, looking to the side as the flow of Lavi's tears picks up again.

"I'm done, Kanda." Lavi's voice cracks. By the time Kanda spares him a cynical glance, Lavi has already thrown open the door and is running out.

---

It's later that night. Lavi enters Kanda's room without knocking. Kanda looks up from his book.

"I'm sorry." Lavi states.

"For what?" Kanda says nonchalantly. As if to put a finer point on his indifference, his slender fingers pick up a page with a distracting crinkle.

"For…crying, I guess." Even though he was the one to come in, Lavi acts lost--in a new place and not knowing where to look. He avoids Kanda and glances at the nonexistent furnishings. "And taking things out on you," he finishes, making a stronger attempt at certainty before Kanda stops pretending to care about reading and address his presence.

"You didn't do it unfairly. I shouldn't have made you cry." Irony creeps into the corner's of Kanda's mouth as his gaze sweeps over Lavi, unreservedly appraising. "I didn't think I would have been able to."

Lavi stands meekly before him, palms up in helplessness. "I wouldn't have thought so either. But Komui…and now you think there's something wrong with me too."

Kanda smiles his eerily foreboding smile. "I don't ask any questions. Whatever story you have about why your innocence alone still hasn't crystallized, or why most of the seals of your Innocence are still sealed, you can keep for yourself."

Lavi laughs shakily. "If only Komui could be nice as you, Kanda. Hey Kanda, would you ask questions if I were replaced?"

Kanda cocks his head, propped up by an exasperated fist. He seems weary of his mask of standoffish friendliness is, but at the same time, compelled to be patient. He is being tender, in a contemptuous sort of way.

"You want a question from me? Here's one: why are you calling me that?"

"Kanda?" Lavi tries tentatively.

"Yes. Why are you calling me by my surname." Kanda's words are firm, so Lavi meets them.

"Because it's the most honest. Back when I used your first name…I was being rude and oblivious on purpose. I know we're not on such familiar terms. "

Kanda shrugs, a disarmingly casual gesture. "We're close enough for you to use my given name if you want. You're the only one I've talked to seriously for years. Everyone else is such a clown around here."

"What about Lenalee?" Lavi falters, a hint of disgust creeping into his inquiry.

Kanda hides a unkind scoff behind his palm, black with leather. His amusement is laced with mild guilt. "She talks at me. I don't put any thought into what I say to her."

At Lavi's stricken look he amends diplomatically:

"I don't think she has an easy life. But all of her problems is because she's a woman. How am I supposed to know anything that will make things better for her? She's alone in her fight and it's better off that way--Even though she tricks herself into thinking I'm helping. Maybe that helps."

"That's…that's not right. You can't decide what's best for her, all she--anyone--wants is sincerity and honesty--"

"--Do they--?"

"--That's condescension, that's--!…" Lavi grips the edge of the table, breathing heavy and screwing his eye shut. He bites his lip in an effort to stay in composed. Kanda stares at Lavi's torn state with deep interest.

"I used to really dislike you. From the moment we met I could tell that there was something unnatural about you." he breaks the heavy silence lightly. "You were always one of two extremes, happy or angry. Nothing in between. Everything about you was forced, even if no one else wanted to see it. I understood from the very beginning that you were using my name as part of your act. So I didn't want you to give it to you."

"That was what we decided for 'Lavi'. I had no choice." Lavi whispers, resentful. But the anger softens into wistfulness. "But he wasn't so bad. He was one of the more fun ones to get people to believe. You're a strange one, Kanda. Usually I'm--I was--perfect. I must have been…tired…"

"Whatever. Whoever you became after Bookman left…after the bookman left you… the person you became is always uneasy, but it's real. I like him much better" Kanda grins a real grin, which has a smidgen of crazy in it, but Lavi misses the rarer-than-pearls thing because he's preoccupied with glaring at the floorboards.

"I think I hate him." Lavi replies tonelessly.

"That's fine. A good many of us hate ourselves." Kanda consoles him, putting an arm around his slumped shoulders. Lavi leans into the support. They stay like that for a few minutes.

"I tried to want this, Kanda. I really did." Lavi's words are small, but they take up the room.

"I know." Kanda answers, neutral. "You did good."

"Oh. Thank you." Lavi looks out the window. It's an uncommonly clear night and the starbursts, thick swarms of lights with vaguely different nuances, bunches up upon black. "You know, people always say how there's no easy way to get out of something like that. Hating yourself, I mean. Because you can't hide from you are. But…I've spent so much time trying to stop already. All this time, actually. It's not like I did nothing. Have I done enough to deserve it? Stopping. I want to stop. I want to be something…that can stop."

"That's fine." Kanda tells him quietly.

Lavi takes a deep breath that turns into a sigh.

"I want to go home." he confesses after three years, four months, two weeks, and four days.

---

"How could you change your mind?! What did we have to do? Even though you couldn't keep up, we let you keep trying! Even though you fell behind, we kept you with us--we did…we begged Komui to give you another chance, we visited you every day in the hospital wing, we did…!"

It's Lenalee crying and screaming in the garden, trembling hands clutching at her streaming face and carefully groomed hair. She looks as if her knees were cut out from underneath her. Allen grips her shoulders to stop her from collapsing, but her eyes seem to be filled with some invisible horror.

"--I did everything I could to keep us together! I…" she really does lurch forward and sinks, taking Allen with her. She clenches handfuls of new grass, ripping the green shoots from their roots.

It's a deceptively tranquil early spring day, replete with soft yellow leaf nubs just starting to push out of the smooth baby branches like wisdom teeth.

Lavi-not-really-Lavi-but-he-hasn't-chosen-his-new-persona-yet looks down pityingly at her. He kneels down to scoop her into an embrace, tug her back to her feet, but she swats his outstretched hands away.

"Go. Just go." she orders him numbly. "Don't try to…I understand now. You're like…no, you're even worse than Kanda…He pushes you aside, he won't talk, he just looks at you like an uncomprehending animal whenever you try to tell him anything. But he means it. You…you never mean anything. " she doesn't sound bitter or accusing, just overwhlemed in her moment of truth. "Go. I can't trust anything you give us. Me. Go."

Lavi trudges down the same beaten path that Bookman departed on years before. Unlike him, he can't help taking many backwards glances. Lenalee still staring at her dirt-specked hands thrust into the lawns. Allen pulling anxiously at her and Lenalee grabbing him like he tried to run away. The two of them getting up together to go inside together, with bowed heads drooping like a pair of sad china figures.

Kanda jogs after him, long legs making it easy for him to keep up with Lavi's large, purposeful strides. Lavi might be a bit slower for the large pack on his back.

"Since when have I been a living insult?" Kanda grumbles at his side, not really offended.

"I don't think it was an insult. It just shows that you two understand each other." Lavi says softly. " How far are you going to come with me?"

"Just to the docks. It's lonely having to move to a new home by yourself. I know."

"Thank you, Yuu-san." Lavi lifts his eyes to the horizon. It's cutting his world apart. He smiles at it.

Author's Note:

Had a huge writer's block called college. I broke my promise to stop writing Lavi as an angsty sod...It's just too damn easy. But I seem to be getting back into the KandaLavi mood (even if this is strictly friendship.) I know I've gotten in a theme of people leaving the Order...sorry if it's getting old, but I just wanted to try a plot where Lavi gives leaving behind Bookmanhood a shot, and finds that he doesn't like it so much. It's rather anti-canon, but I really wanted to run with it....Hope it sounded plausible. Kanda's there...because his bleak, cynical aesthetic seems more compatible to this kind of situation. He knows that the sometimes who you really are and you really want doesn't lie in the warm and fuzzy region...being so experienced with that himself, it seemed appropriate that he be the one to hang around while Lavi's tries to figure himself out. Thanks for reading.


End file.
